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corrail << corral

“The herd’s tetchy as a teased snake tonight. Git yer hayburner over t’ the south pasture and corral them wayward doggies.”

Not hard to guess which genre of fiction a line like that might belong to.

The “corral” in this sentence is a staple of the literature of and about the American West. It looks as though it may be one of the many horse-steals from Mexican Spanish, an etymological partner of “bronco,” “adobe,” “buckaroo,” “arroyo,” and the like. And it may be. The Spanish “_corral_,” a word for an enclosed place, starts to show up in English with some regularity in the 1820s and 1830s (Darwin mentions it in The Voyage of the Beagle ) A century earlier, however, English speakers had already borrowed the Dutch krall, a word for a native village surrounded by a stockade. Krall, though, probably derives from the Spanish/Portuguese corral, so the two streams leading to the cowboy word flow from a single source.

A corral in the Old West is often defined by a rail fence. Could this be the reason that some web authors write “corrail?” Examples:

Description of video: “So we corrailed some staff, Jay Mohr went to work and the first episode of Conference Room Comedy is born.”

Gaming forum: “We just have to see how well the NWO patch fixes this problem with the game, because it is a problem that 95% of the playerbase is corrailed in empire space.”

A Jain sermon: “I saw a movie called The Slaughterhouse Reform Bill in which the ‘Kosher Kill’ was exposed without commentary. Cows, calves, lambs were corrailed down a narrow corridor. ”

Forum post: “I am saying you are being corrailed by those who you are against and there are implants within OWS”

Post on global warming site: “If I understand Professor Ravetz, he is saying that if climate science was recognised as PNS to begin with, we would not have allowed ourselves to be corrailed into panic policy making, and advocacy masquerading as science – the prostitution of science itself.”

Wrestling forum: “There are forces at work in Hardkore World of the rauckus-causing variety! Too wild to be corrailed, too powerful to be impeded, and more probably than not too drunk to realize you are in our way!!! ”

Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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